My der Brucer's post above about the LA River has reminded me of where I first learned of it's history - on a program called
Ralph Story's Los Angeles, where the veteran broadcaster would dig up a half hour's worth of LA history every Saturday. He was one heck of a good storyteller, always able to make things interesting.
So, to
ASK BK: Which Los Angeles newspeople do you remember best, and why? (The good and the bad; no reason to leave Connie Chung out of all this!
)
Going off on a tangent, when it rains in LA it doesn't just
sprinkle sprinkle sprinkle, it comes out in
TORRANTS! And I mean all over the place, not just in Torrence! This of course leads to flooding, which the drainage systems usually take care of fairly well (hence the need for the LA River's concrete embankments, because that's where all the drainage goes).
The other half of the problem is brushfires, which kick up every few years. The natural growth in the hills gets tinder dry, and all it takes is a stray match to set things off. In fact, there are plants that require fire to help germinate their seeds, so fire is a natural part of the process! But I can remember times when the fires were so thick and heavy that the sky would turn orange, as the sunlight tried to work it's way through all the smoke. Another year, we'd gone to a drive-in movie, and I can't even remember what was on the screen because the lines of fires in the hills were far more interesting to watch. And there was the one fire in the early autumn when I was in the 5th grade that struck very close to home.
Our house in Burbank was in the first block below the hills and all that underbrush. This one year, the fires came to within yards of the street between the undeveloped area and our block. Dad was fortunately with us that week, instead of off at the real Area 51 with all the test pilots, and left work to spend the entire day on the roof of our house, hosing things down. The next spring, he sprung for new asbestos roofing to replace the shake shingles we'd had before. Much safer.
Ah, but before we got that new roof, the rains came. That's what happens in March and April; there's torrential rains. And the brush that was in the hills wasn't there, and hadn't had any chance to grow back. So naturally, there was nothing to hold the soil down in the hills, and as the ground reached the saturation point, gravity did it's thing. The waterlogged dirt turned to mud, and we were hit by mudslides.
We were lucky. By chance, the street we lived on was on a semi-ridge, so that the water and mud instead wend down the streets to either side of ours. But the people on those other streets had some real problems, with mud cascading down, knocking down trees which, in turn, would turn the waters away from the street and towards the houses. Some of the people had to evacuate, to return to find their houses filled with mud. There was some serious clean-up that had to be done after that.
I suppose Los Angeles might have less park-land than other major cities, per capita. But it still has areas of wild lands, which more than makes up for that "lack". And Los Angeles is just one city in the entire county of Los Angeles. Even along the streets, there is much greenery, and enough trees to make it what ecologists call an "urban forest." Were there brushfires? Floods? Earthquakes? Of course. But these things were momentary, and gave the place a chance to renew and rebuild. It was a very good place to grow up. I can't imagine why anyone would prefer a concrete jungle.
